The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) has been leading efforts to digitize government documents over the past few years, with 300,000 documents currently available in the HathiTrust and an additional 200,000 available from other Google partners. Based on a belief that US federal documents represent a critical and core resource for the DPLA, the Government Publications: Enhanced Access and Discovery through Open Linked Data and Crowdsourcing Beta Sprint project is an attempt to use linked data strategies to express relationships between HathiTrust resources that would otherwise remain hidden from public view. The project goes one step further and makes use of crowdsourcing mechanisms to associate and sequence related components of legislative history.
John Butler, Associate University Librarian for Information Technology at the University of Minnesota, spoke with me over the phone last week to talk about his team’s Beta Sprint project. He and his team were selected to present at the October 21st Plenary meeting in Washington, DC.
Listen to the interview: